Calling Your Baby Ugly

 By Thomas Kies

When I teach my Creative Writing course at the college, I’ll bring out some of Stephen King’s tidbits of advice for writers.  One of them is to have a thick skin.  

When first starting out and looking for both an agent and a publisher, unless you’re very talented and very, very lucky, at best you’ll be getting rejections.  At worst, you’ll be ignored.  

There are some agents, publishers, and editors who will send you a rejection that simply says, “This isn’t a fit for us at this time.”  Or something to that effect.  

Once in a great while, you may get an actual reason why they’re not accepting your work.  But most often, you don’t hear anything at all. 

An interesting sidenote, I sent query letters and chapters of RANDOM ROAD out to agents in 2015.  I was lucky enough to get requests from four agents for the entire manuscript and did eventually sign a contract with my agent, Kimberley Cameron, whom I adore.  The book was published in 2017 and the second book in the series, DARKNESS ROAD, was published in 2018.

After the second book was published, I received a rejection from an agent in New York for RANDOM ROAD, nearly three years after I’d sent her a query letter.  Better late than never, I guess.

So, even if you get published, be prepared for criticism, both good and bad.  My latest book, WHISPER ROOM received this from Publishers Weekly, “Readers will hope to see a lot more of the down-to-earth Geneva… Sara Paretsky fans will find much to like.”

Yay!!!!!

Now, overwhelmingly on Goodreads and Netgalley, I’ve been lucky enough to receive glowing reviews.  However, I also got these:

“Unfortunately, I could not finish.  I’m not interested in reading about alcoholic characters and the story was very clunky and disjointed.”

My main character is a reformed alcoholic and never drinks at all in the book.  Just sayin’.

In another review, the reader
said that she liked the book, but only gave it one star because I used the “Lord’s name in vain”.  Yeah, it was in dialogue…I write how people talk, damn it. 

But overwhelmingly, the other reviews have been outstanding, so nothing to gripe about.  

But sooner or later, we all have our “babies called ugly.”  Take a look at some famous writers and their reviews:

The Guardian talking about J. K. Rowling’s HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE back in 1997, said that its “…pedestrian, ungrammatical prose style, which has left me with a headache and a sense of wasted opportunity.”  It also said, “Her characters, unlike life’s, are all black-and-white.  Her story lines are predictable, the suspense minimal, the sentimentality cloying every page.”

Once again, in the Guardian, they talk about Suzanne Collins’ THE HUNGER GAMES, “I found it predictable, dull, unoriginal, and riddled with errors. Unfortunately, I cannot think of a single reason to recommend it.” 

About Margaret Atwood’s THE HANDMAID’S TALE, The New York Times said that the book is, “powerless to scare.” It said that it’s “ordinary” and “unpardonable”.  Time Magazine said that it “lacks the direct, chilling plausibility of ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’ and ‘Brave New World’.”

The point is, not everyone is going to like your work.  It’s part of the territory.  But if you’re lucky, many more people will love what you write and that’s what makes it all worthwhile. 

A random observation about reviews

by Rick Blechta

My post last week dealt with getting reviews for one’s book. It’s common knowledge that reviews make or break books, and getting reviewed by someone influential or in an influential publication, are the best kind. That’s logical, right? But getting your book in the hands of one of these people remains a significant issue, unless you’re a best-selling authors. Everyone else is left to scramble — and hope at winning the review lottery.

As last week progressed, my thinking about my post continued. How reliable are reviews on social media and websites? So I did a bit of poking around.

My highly unscientific conclusion is that reviews on Amazon and web retailers of that ilk tend to be more positive than not. Yes, there are one-star reviews, but these tend to be outliers, some by those with an obvious ax to grind. I randomly chose several dozen titles and tabulated the aggregate review numbers. The only criteria I used in making my list was that the book had to have 20 or more reviews. Seventy-three percent were 3+ stars or better. Not of all of the titles I looked at were by recognized authors or authors published by recognized houses. There were also some self-published titles (22).

It’s easy enough to get friends to write a review for one’s books, and I doubt if these people would give you a bad review. Everyone wants to help their friends after all. This goes for traditionally published authors as well as self-published ones.

But in doing my spot of research another thought occurred to me: with the exception of those reviewing friends’ books, there is likely an unintentional bias in the purchase of books which are then reviewed by non-professional reviewers. Think about that a bit. We tend to purchase books we think we might enjoy reading. Speaking for myself, I’m not about to lay out some hard-earned cash to buy something I probably won’t enjoy. Who would? Reading books is not at all like taking medications your doctor prescribes!

So how do you know if you’re ever getting the straight goods on a book? Did someone purchase the reviews? Were friends recruited? How accurate are they?

Geez, this whole review thing is a lot more complicated now than it’s ever been.

Thoughts?

The invisible foe

Barbara here. What do the West Edmonton Mall, feminist writers, and Justine Sacco have in common? They have all been in the news recently as targets of internet threats. The internet is surely the great invention of our era, connecting us across the world and providing access to knowledge, entertainment, and services at the click of a mouse. It is such an integral part of most of our lives that it's difficult to remember how we did things before. Book a flight, find a B&B, find the best Italian restaurant in town, bake oatmeal scones, compare features of lawnmowers... It's all there. And email and social media have made it possible to stay connected (and indeed to reconnect) with friends and family around the world. To share photos and anecdotes and birthdays.

But with this vast, unfettered playground have come the playground bullies, who have their own dark desires to fulfill  and who revel in the chance to unleash their cruel side without ever having to reveal their identity or look their victim in the eye. We've all encountered them. At their most harmless, they are the trolls who hijack the 'comments' sections of newspaper articles with absurd rants or who make crude personal attacks in place of reasoned argument. Most of us have learned to ignore them rather than respond and thus give them the forum they crave.

As writers, whose work is out in the public sphere, we have to learn to ignore a special kind of troll– the negative reviewer. By this I don't mean the carefully considered critique that finds our work lacking. As painful as these are for us to read, we generally recognize they are written in the spirit of appraisal rather than attack. But there are reviewers out there whose goal is not to appraise or critique but rather to trash. Because they can. Because they enjoy it. Although these are more difficult to ignore, because their negative reviews can affect the ratings of our books, we generally grit our teeth and try to ignore them too.

But many forms of internet abuse are far more destructive, because of formless and unknowable nature of the threat. Sometimes it becomes a multi-headed monster, as when a single, ill-advised tweet gets retweeted and retweeted until perfect strangers all around the world are savaging you (as happened to Justine Sacco), causing you to lose privacy, friends, and sometimes even your job. How to contain it, how to grapple with it and try to reverse it?

Sometimes the threats are graphic and criminal in nature, as in the case of the feminist writers who were threatened with rape and other violent retribution, but the persons responsible, being anonymous, cannot be called to account and dealt with. Not knowing where the danger lies, or how serious it is, can lead to serious anxiety, which is of course one of the abusers' goals. Such is also the tactic of terrorists making videos containing vague threats of destruction, the exact time and place unknown but specific enough (like the West Edmonton mall mention) to sow fear and get the reaction they want– a world held hostage to nameless and faceless bandits.

But to bring this back to writers, on a much smaller scale, I have begun to notice a small but increasing number of nasty personal attacks, some of which have made me feel vaguely unsafe. Writers are vulnerable because our work– and our soul– is out there for all to see, and we encourage interaction with the public. I have a Facebook page which anyone can view, and a website with contact information. Generally I love the messages and emails I receive, the vast majority from readers who have enjoyed my books or want to know when the next is due out, etc. Sometimes I receive pleasant, mildly chiding messages correcting a fact or a typo in one of my books, and these too I appreciate.

But I have received a few notes which seem just plain nasty, which attack the book or myself in a way that feels vindictive. As a crime writer I tackle social and moral issues, and I understand the messages in my books are not going to appeal to everyone. Sometimes I choose to respond, and the exchange of emails opens up a dialogue that ultimately enriches both of us. But in most instances I sense there is no basis for reasonable dialogue; that as with 'comment' trolls, the vitriol is the thing, not the message itself.

But it does leave me feeling vaguely unsettled. Vaguely threatened. I would be easy to find, if someone chose to go beyond the emailing of nasty notes. And as I embark on my new series, which will tackle even more global moral and human rights issues than I did previously– issues such as human trafficking, self-radicalization, and human rights– I suspect the subtle threats may increase. It gives a writer pause, not just about what they might choose to write about, but also about how publicly available they want to be. Which would be too bad.

I'd be interested in hearing people's experiences with this, both as readers and writers. Is the phenomenon growing, and if so, how do we respond?